Shma;An Online Journal of Jewish Responsibility

The Meaning of Things

By Ellen Smith

Review Essay of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage By Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xviii + 326 pp.

The study of texts, and the study of objects, usually lead us down different paths of inquiry, and sometimes lead to different conclusions. Those of us who work in Jewish studies and Jewish museums are constantly seeking to become more adept both at interpreting the material world, and through it, reinterpreting the standard narratives of Jewish history, culture, and faith. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet's Destination Culture helps us enormously in that conversation and quest.

The past twenty years have seen an explosion of superb work done in material and cultural studies. Much of it originated outside the field of Jewish studies. Robert Orsi and Thomas Tweed wrote breathtaking histories of entire Catholic communities by exploring the meaning of single objects or shrines. Leigh Eric Schmidt helped pioneer our understanding of American culture itself by exploring the meaning of consumer exchange and "rites." Colleen McDannell's essays on "material Christianity" and Sally Promey's books on how differently people "see" religious images stand among the best contemporary works that rewrite the standard historical cannon by introducing material culture into the mix.

Jewish studies, too, offers excellent models for integrating material culture into our standard interpretations of Jewish culture. Sander Gilman's work on Jewish bodies, and the exceptionally fine essays in Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb's edited volume, The Jew in the Text, open our definitions of what constitutes the Jewish material world. Richard Cohen's and Charles Delheim's (re)writing of traditional approaches to Jewish art history helps bring us from Jewish art to reinterpretations of Jewish culture. The work on Jewish consumer behavior by Andrew Heinze, and Jenna Weissman Joselit's continuing extraction of deep, fresh meaning from everyday things are models of writing Jewish history from non-textual sources.

As is the pathbreaking work of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Trained as an anthropologist who has spent much of her life writing about theater and performance, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has been pioneering the interpretation of Jewish culture from non-textual sources since the beginning of her distinguished career. Eight of her essays, written between 1988 and 1995, are collected together in this essential volume, Destination Culture. No one working in the Jewish museum field can allow herself or himself to miss them.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's focus is less on objects themselves than on "agencies of display": how people and cultures at various points of encounter with the material world organize that world for interaction, interpretation, and presentation. Her core essay, "Objects of Ethnography," analyzes the paradoxes of museum display, where objects are presented out of context, often in partial or fragmentary form, and, she argues, reveals more about the organizers and exhibition creators than about the objects and culture purportedly being interpreted. "Exhibiting Jews" carries the argument further, looking at half a century of worlds' fairs and the beginnings of the Jewish museum movement, to explore what happens when Jews themselves becomes objects for display. Her ongoing argument-that presentation connotes manipulation, and that all exhibitions are "fundamentally theatrical"-makes Part I of her book required reading for everyone in the Jewish museum field.

The essays in Part II bring a timely critique to the notion of "Jewish heritage" sites, and the potential dangers of turning the messy heritage of a people's culture into a cleaned-up theme park or exhibition. A very savvy essay on "Ellis Island" traces the process whereby a government processing office became the national symbol for all Americans, "no matter what their point of origin, port of entry, time of arrival, or circumstances" (p. 180). The island trumps the rock (Plymouth Rock), and consent, rather than dissent or descent (p.10), becomes the historical narrative. This is surely a cautionary tale. Exhibitions create their own powerful narratives. It is our responsibility to use that knowledge well.

The final section of the book bring us back to issues of performance and interpretation in public spaces, specifically cultural festivals and fairs. "Meaning," she challenges us, seems increasingly to be located "at the destination rather than the source." (p. 12) Can we ever really talk about "them," or is all exhibition really about "us"? How might we work with material evidence to break through this paradox, or can we? Simply put, how can we display material evidence and be clear about the objects and the forms of mediation through which we encounter them?

Perhaps because several of these essays were public lectures before they were written works, they sometimes tantalize more than they fully model or prove. No matter. If they leave us wanting to know more, to see more, to think more, they have more than done their job. I suggest none of us in the Jewish museum world can do our best jobs without taking Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's essays into our consciousness. And if we do, we will have a new vocabulary and a new set of questions in common, to bring to our work, and our work together.

Ellen Smith is Curator of the American Jewish Historical Society, and teaches material culture studies and American Jewish History as Visiting Instructor at Brandeis University and Northeastern University. Her most recent publication, on Jewish New Year Postcards and the immigrant experience, appears in David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001).

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